Suicide in the Military will impact me as a military social worker because “over 8000 military veterans die by suicide every year; that’s nearly 22 suicides every day” (Castro & Kintzle, 2014) it is such a prevalent and high topic area in the military just the impact of PTSD being a marker for suicide has a huge prevalence on social workers. Those with low resilience and lack of support combined with PTSD have more significant chance of trying to commit suicide, as stated in Castro and Kintzle article “beginning in 2004, hospitalizations increased for depression and PTSD, consistent with the early findings showing an increase in suicide rates of Army personnel in Iraq, and well before the observed overall Army increase …show more content…
Also knowing the stigma and the barrier to military receiving help of this kind will warrant a different type of thought process when discussing their options for additional services for example maybe they will want to receive those additional services outside of the VA in the civilian …show more content…
Personally this topic would be a little bit hard for me because my mother had a substance abuse issue and still does to this day I have tried to push my agenda on her on several occasions and every time it fails, but when I encouraged her in other areas of her life like work and school and continuously praised her for her good behavior she seemed to back away from her substance of choice, I don’t know if this was due to her working more (replacing one addiction with another) or if it was my praising her for her hard work I don’t know if I will ever know.
My new insights and awareness and on this topic is that the army has a higher rate of substance abuse than any other service and it would be interesting to find out exactly why. Also the reason for the stigma when receiving substance abuse help is really interesting that, the old school macho believe that mental health assistance is looked at as weak and impulsive in this day in age and is still prevalent today. Knowing that this stigma is still so prevalent today I think other social workers will work hard to erase this stigma and be able to really focus on substance abuse and get to the real